The Coca-Cola kid

Cohon, one of two winners of Western's young alumni award for 2003, grew up in Toronto and graduated from Western with a BA in 1985. In the three years he spent at the University, he started TV Western, was Vice-President Communications for the University Students' Council, created J.W., the Western mascot, initiated the Charity Ball and then got Alan Thicke to host it in the height of his Growing Pains stardom.

Upon graduation, Cohon was one of the first Canadians to take part in "Operation Raleigh" - Prince Charles' operation for science and service. Cohon's project involved carrying out road surveys for the Pan American highway on horseback in the Chilean Jungle. After that, as he puts it, "I basically rode my horse out of the jungle, saw a Coca-Cola sign and thought, oh, I guess I better get a job."

And so, Cohon got a job selling Coca-Cola door-to-door in Miami, Fla., and according to him was simply "promoted and promoted and promoted." When he was 27, he wrote a letter to Coke's chairman telling him he wanted to move. Two weeks later he was on a plane to Russia.

It didn't take Cohon long to get things started in what could be perceived as a challenging environment for Western business. Within two years he successfully launched Coke in the Soviet Union and opened its first factory. Mikhail Gorbachev even attended his 30th birthday party.

Indeed, most people would be pleased to accomplish in a lifetime what Cohon had by the time he was 30. But he was only getting started.

Cohon was promoted five times, and at 36 was Coke's deputy division president for Western Europe, a $2-billion operation. Nevertheless, by the time he was 37 he was ready for another challenge.

"As you get higher in an organization it's harder to keep that entrepreneurial spirit alive. The bigger the roles you have the more structured they become and you lose your edge," he says.

And so while attending the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in 2000 as a recently named "Global Leader for Tomorrow," Cohon made up his mind to make a change.

"I went to hear U.S. President Bill Clinton speak and he asked for someone to create a shared vision for business and to build value for a civil society," he says. "I quit my job with Coke on the spot and I have been dedicated to creating a new type of capitalism ever since."

Cohon responded to Clinton's call to action by creating Globalegacy International - a business development company that serves impoverished communities and their entrepreneurs in cities worldwide.

"There is a whole consciousness of people who are thinking about what success really looks like. To them, the global environment is important. They understand poverty, they understand community, they are upset by corporate greed and government's issues. They don't like the system, but they are having trouble changing it," explains Cohon.

"Our whole model is about changing the system. Globalegacy goes into impoverished communities and we help local entrepreneurs create businesses that are between one and five million in capital. We provide them with support, we help them raise finances, we help with enterprise structuring and we bring in senior executives from large companies to help guide these new businesses with their leadership experience."

Globalegacy started its first business project last year in Tower Hamlets, East London, the poorest community in Western Europe. It is about to expand to Johannesburg, Rio de Janeiro, Beijing and Mexico City. Cohon's goal is to have financing in place for these cities within one year and to raise $1 billion overall by 2007, and he's not stopping there.

"In about 20 years I see 500 businesses in poor communities and 1,000 senior executives from large organizations working with us," predicts Cohon.

Indeed it seems the man who did it all by the time he was 30, managed
to do even more by 40. And we can only imagine how his resume will change by the time he's 50. Talk about a career with pop!